Passing the Endurance Test; Job Projections Are Dim For the Movie Projectionists

By EDWARD LEWINE

Published: May 30, 1999

Two projectors whirred away at 24 frames per second, casting the colored lights of ''Entrapment'' and ''Trippin' '' on the movie screens at the United Artists Criterion Theater in Times Square. Jim Anderson, 61, a film projectionist for 30 years, kept a wary eye on the machinery. A tall jovial man, Mr. Anderson took a drag on an unfiltered Pall Mall and delivered a glum assessment of his profession's future. ''It looks like there won't be any projectionists anymore,'' he said.

In the late 1940's, more than 2,400 trained projectionists worked in New York City, said Steve D'Inzillo, president of the Moving Picture Projectionists, Video Technicians and Allied Crafts Union, Local 306. Now there are fewer than 500. Changes in technology and the movie theater business have hurt the trade, Mr. D'Inzillo said, and New York is one of few places left in the country with professional projectionists. In 80 percent of the country's cinemas, he said, managers or ushers run the projectors.

Mr. D'Inzillo said New York's projectionists would endure. ''We have a strong union,'' he said. But others were less sanguine. ''You'd be hard pressed to find too many people planning on making this a profession for the next 20 or 30 years,'' said John Wilmers, the president of Ballantyne of Omaha, a company that manufactures projectors and sold $75 million worth of them last year.

Until the late 70's, movies were shown with two projectors per screen, with one or two projectionists alternating 20-minute rolls of film and also controlling the lights, the curtain and music played during breaks. Today film unwinds in a continuous loop off four-foot-wide circular platters, and the lights and curtain are automated.

''In the old days you would have two men working one screen,'' said Anthony Tavolacci, a projectionist at the Museum of Modern Art. ''Now you have a multiplex with one guy running 12 screens.'' Mr. Tavolacci said that the advent of the multiplex theater had hurt as much as the new technology, because single-screen neighborhood theaters had employed their own teams of projectionists.

For the last few decades, the union has fought the major theater operators in the city as wages have fallen and jobs have been lost. Projectionists, who make $13 to $25.75 an hour, said they were being pushed out by greedy theater owners who did not care if films were out of focus or if showings were canceled because of technical glitches.

The executive director of the National Association of Theater Owners of New York State, Robert Sunshine, said movies could easily be shown with a minimum number of trained workers. ''They are not being pushed out,'' he said of the projectionists. ''They are being automated out of their jobs.'' EDWARD LEWINE